The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared (book review)
by Casey Mulligan Walsh
Publisher: Motina Books
Review by Amanda Le Rougetel
Persistence is a survival strategy that many of us learn the hard way. Things happen in our life and to survive them means simply carrying on. No choice: Just. Keep. Going.
Casey Mulligan Walsh learned this lesson at an early age and kept learning it as her life unfolded. She was orphaned at ten; her only sibling died when she was twenty; her first-born child was killed in young adulthood; and her first marriage dissolved in an acrimonious divorce.
To call Walsh a survivor is a bit of an understatement.
Her memoir tells the tale—yes, of these huge personal losses, but more significantly, maybe, of her persistence in surviving them as a wholly loving woman and, over time and with great patience and faith in herself, growing into her own thriving person.
In unflinching prose, Walsh lays down on the page the events of her life, complete with characters who are loving and who are not; with events that bring joy and those that bring shocking sorrow; with opportunities fought for, lost or regained one way or another. In short it’s the full catastrophe — a reference from Zorba the Greek, who asks: “Am I not a man?… I’m a man. So I married. Wife, children, house, everything. The full catastrophe.” Walsh reflects on this: “That’s what I wanted, too. Bring on the sleepless nights and the messy diapers, the overwhelming years of lessons and sports practice, the college expenses, the inevitable relationship challenges. I wanted all of it, everything I believed I’d been denied, and I was committed to making it happen. Perhaps I should have been more careful what I asked for. I made the life I believed I could have, set grander goals aside, and filled in the gaps where reality failed with wishful thinking. Of course, that couldn’t last.”
For me, this yearning for a life filled with the joyous chaos of loving and losing and, still, loving again — a good life lived fully — this most basic of human wants, really, this is what kept me hooked in Walsh’s memoir. The specifics are sad, but her drive for love and caring, for home and family is not. It is the opposite. It is hope-filled and, dare I say, inspiring. Not because it all turns out alright, though in many ways it does, but because Walsh’s story shows how an ordinary woman, with a fierce commitment to wanting “the full catastrophe” of a life of love and connections can find exactly that by holding tight to her belief that somewhere, somehow she would find herself in a place where she knew, deeply and fully, that she “truly belonged”.
With all the tragedies Walsh has faced, one might expect the book to be difficult to get through. Not so.
Yes, this book is about sadness: “For nearly twenty-five years, I’ve lived in a world where your whole family can die and leave you. Now, so can your children.”
But it is also about perspective: “Losing my son is something that happened to me, an overwhelming grief. But it’s not my identity.”
And it is about change: “With the safety of the years that have passed and the embrace of a loving partner, I realize that of all the things I’ve come to believe, these six words have changed me most: Everything that isn’t love is fear.
Ultimately, this book is about living fiercely, about facing the heartbreak and loss in front of you, yet continuing to live deeply and fully despite the grief and the sorrow: “[I am] determined to live the life I have and not the one I fear.”
I read memoirs to learn from others, from the experience of a life not my own. Walsh’s memoir delivered on both counts. Her clear, clean writing took me into a life vastly different from my own, on a journey of immense and relentless loss of which I have no first-hand knowledge, to a place of universal resting: Life is, indeed, the full catastrophe. Embracing it, living it, and loving ourself throughout it all is the very meaning of life itself.
In a nutshell: Casey Mulligan Walsh’s memoir The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared is gripping, instructive and heartwarming. Find the book everywhere good books are sold; find Walsh on Substack.
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